


artifacts from the end of days

by rebeccabuck



Series: reflections on the motive power of fire [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Relationship, The Drift (Pacific Rim)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-07
Updated: 2014-09-07
Packaged: 2018-02-16 09:35:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2264700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rebeccabuck/pseuds/rebeccabuck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermann dreams, Newt disappears, and the future looks back through time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the beginning of what will likely be a sprawling sequence that has been eating my brain for months, and I am hoping that in posting it I will kick my butt into gear to continue working on the rest. (I'd also like to give a very, very big thank you to those who were enthusiastic over my initial sharing of bits and pieces of this over tumblr all those months ago.)

 

> Both the editor-translator and the publisher of this work must admit that their  _raison d'etre_ for collaborating on this book can not be found in the usual explanations of hoping to gain either money or notoriety.  In fact, it is not likely that this translation will sell any more than its original German incarnation did.  Nor is the driving force behind this project purely borne of intellectual fascination with its topic, though that is indeed a major factor.  Coming up on a quarter of a century from the closing of the Breach, we still do not have a thorough understanding of the phenomena that lead to such widespread destruction of our world.  Quite frankly, once it seemed certain that the danger  _had_ in fact passed, the majority of the scientific community slowly but surely stopped concerning itself with the Breach at all, and instead began to focus again on making day-to-day life as safe and comfortable as possible.
> 
> Not Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, however.  One of only two men to ever attempt drifting with a Kaiju brain, and a mathematician whose efforts were essential to the eventual defeat of the extra-dimensional creatures, Gottlieb continued to work to understand the Breach until the end of his life.  We have the accounts of colleagues and his few friends to prove this; we do not have any of his work.  He, so far as is known, wiped all computerized data of his theories, and burnt the hard-copies not long before he died in 2047.  
> 
> All of his theories, that is, except for those compiled in this thin volume of proofs, originally published in German in 2026.  Gottlieb made no effort to promote or translate this work, and if not for the University of Cambridge's strenuous policy on obtaining copies of work by their most eminent alumni, it may have been lost to time.  Five months after its publication, Gottlieb gave his last public lecture on Breach physics, and never spoke of the matter publicly again.  The date of that lecture coincides almost exactly with the seeming disappearance of Gottlieb's old PPDC K-Science colleague, the only other human ever to drift with a Kaiju, Dr. Newton Geiszler.
> 
> It is with a deep sense of certainty that Gottlieb's more theoretical work must have been in some way connected to the actual events going on in and around his life that year that we approached our work on translating and publishing this volume.  Gottlieb was a fiercely private man throughout his entire life, and it seems likely the only way one will ever understand one of the greatest minds of the last century will be through understanding his life's work.  And so we embarked on this project with a sense of infinite curiousity very much in keeping, we hope, with the epigraph Gottlieb himself chose for the original publication.  It is from Mary Shelley's novel  _Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus -_
>
>> _It was a bold question, and one which has ever been considered as a mystery; yet with how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries._

**\- From the Introduction to Dr. Ada Wentworth's 2099 translation of Dr. Hermann Gottlieb's _Proofs_ _Towards an Interdimensional Topology_   _and the Possible Applicability of Differential Manifolds In Understanding the Breach_**


	2. Chapter 2

**October 26, 2026 - Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA**

The dude pulls up to Pete's Storage in a shitty beat-up Ford pickup that is  _shaking_ with how loud the Springsteen pouring out of it is, and Todd is in no way paid enough to deal with some podunk Jersey Republican who wants a place to keep all his guns, but then the guy behind the wheel climbs out and -  _holy shit_ that isn't  _Newton fucking Geiszler,_ there is  _no way._ It is, though, and he's ambling up to the front counter with a grin on his face, jingling his keys in his pocket and bouncing on the balls of his feet. _  
_

"Hey dude," he says.  "I gotta store some stuff.  You got any lockers free to rent?"

He's damp for some reason and Todd can  _see_ the tattoos through his white button up and oh god, he's  _ogling_ one of the guys who helped save the world and -

"Uh, yeah.  Do you need a certain size?  Or we've got different rates -"

"Nah, bro, it's not much, I just ne - I mean, price doesn't matter.  Just gimme whatever."

So Todd gives him unit 426, and he's man enough to admit to himself that he chooses that one because he'll have to walk Geiszler to it if he wants to find it before they close, and he hands over the paperwork for him to fill out, and then he goes and blows it anyways -"You're Newton Geiszler," blurted out like his sixteen year old sister the time they ran into that popstar on the boardwalk, fuck - but Geiszler just grins and says "Call me Newt, man.   _Please_ call me Newt, actually.  I'll beg ya if I have to."

And Todd - Todd does not say anything to that.

Geiszler pays for a full two years of storage up front, batting aside all of Todd's attempts to point out that they've got more than one way for him to set up some kind of installment plan, and that's when Todd notices that his grin actually looks a little strained, that his eyes are bloodshot and framed with heavy purple bags.  That's when Todd starts to actually pay attention.  To the nervous ticks, to the fake joking, to the fact that his shirt is soaked through with sweat despite the fact that it's January and miserable outside.

They walk to the storage unit in silence.

Geiszler's only got a small cardboard box to leave in it, and Todd decides against asking why he's even bothering to store it in a locker after watching the reverential way he lifts it out of the passenger side of his truck.  That's a pretty common thing here, actually.  Some people use storage lockers to store all their useless crap they don't want to have to deal with, but not everyone.  Some people come here hoping an anonymous stranger will keep their secrets safe.

Todd stopped going to Church in his senior year of high school, but everyone approaches a confessional with the same attitude no matter where they are.

They get back to the front office, and Todd can't stop himself from asking, "Hey - are you ok?"

He can see the way Geiszler automatically goes for false bravado before changing his mind, pausing for a second, and then finally saying, "You know what?  Fuck it.  When do you get off?"

*

It's not a date.

They go straight back to Todd's apartment and Geiszler - Todd can't, not even now, call him Newt, and he's not sure why but he knows he's right in feeling this way about it - Geiszler doesn't seem to notice the posters on the walls or the stacks of textbooks everywhere.  He just crowds Todd back against the front door, boxing in his slimmer frame, and leans up to kiss him furiously.

It's not a date, and it's not soft.

They fall into bed and Geiszler bites at Todd's neck, leaves clawed-red marks on his hips and back and chest.  He's almost frantic in his movements, fucking against Todd so hard and tight his cock  _must_ chafe with it; Todd lies back and lets him, lets his wrists be pinned by tattooed arms, watches as the kaijus seem to come alive with his rutting.  Even in his passiveness, it's Todd who comes first.

He wakes up to an empty apartment and a feeling of complete unsurprise.  He looks down at his skinny, pale chest and sees the red marks raked into the skin, though, and he grins.

On his nightstand are two things: a key with the number '426' etched into it, and a note:

> _You can look if you want. ~~Thanks.~~  Sorry.  - Newt_

On his lunch break, Todd does.  The proofs are way over his head even now, and the rest of it just seems like a random assortment of crap that Geiszler had cleared out of the cab of his truck or something, but the drawings of the kaiju - those seem even more alive than Geiszler's tattoos had the night before.  They almost look like they weren't drawn by a human.

Todd re-locks the storage unit behind him, and when he gets home that night he puts the key in a bowl of water and puts that bowl into his freezer.

*

Five days later, on Halloween of all the fucking days, every news channel in Jersey is reporting Dr. Newton Geiszler, the man who drifted with a kaiju and helped save the world, is missing.

Todd throws up everything he eats for the next week.


	3. Chapter 3

**//ITEM OF INTEREST:** a box of early 2nd-millenial artifacts bought at a black market dealer’s shop in the formerly prosperous Repulse Bay district of Hong Kong Island.

 **//CONTENTS:** a right-handed leather glove, as worn by motorcyclists.  no match; a self-bound proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, offering an alternative to Andrew Wiley, 37 pages long; a pair of eyeglasses, thick black plastic frame, lenses shattered; multiple biological sketches of  _Kaiju_ bodies; multiple obsolete compact disc recordings of popular music of the time including, incongruously, operatic soprano Monica Schwartz’s rendition of Médée; an era-appropriate computer hard drive, damaged and obsolete.  All we have so far been able to recover are a series of messages presumably saved to the disc from a portable phone.  Many are indecipherable or consist merely of several seconds of the sound of breathing, but there is one, the seventh recording removed from the drive, that may be of interest. A transcription follows below.

**RECORDING 1394.07 LENGTH 1.56 MINS**

_"…Hermann, man, answer your fucking phone.  You gotta know it’s me who’s calling you.  You gotta know - c’mon, man, I’d leave you alone if I could, dude, but this is big, this is fuck-off scary.  I’m wetting my pants, dude, and I need your help.  Hell, Hermann, we’re all gonna need your help.  There’s been some sort of -_ [indecipherable noises] -  _fuck, fuck, Hermann, dude, listen to me, it’s not over okay?  You gotta go back to the lab, dude, you gotta -_ [dead air, followed by a mechanical click]”


	4. Chapter 4

 

Hermann dreams.

He does not suffer himself the option of sleeplessness, nor does he attempt to procure any pills or other concoctions in the hopes that he can stop the visions that come in the night.  He knows they will not help, knows the dreams are not coming from him.

That is what terrifies him.

Not because of the Drift, or the possibility of another inside his head - it is only Newton, after all, the only man in the world who could look and see and understand what he sees without judgement.  Only Newton, sheerly Newton, utterly and all-encompassingly  _Newton._

Inconsequentially, Hermann would add, were this ever to come up in conversation, and he knows it never will but feels the need to assert it to himself all the same, inconsequentially, Hermann has never had a problem with being  _seen._ It is being misapprehended, miscategorized that he cannot abide.  Irritating conniption fit of a man that Newton was -  _is_ \- he was still intelligent enough to never make that mistake.

And so Hermann dreams, and does not tell anyone of what he sees.  Does not so much as write it down, as he knows he will not forget easily, and if something big enough forces him to, that it will not matter anymore, then.

What Hermann sees, tinged white-blue like burning magnesium, is this:

_rows of shining inhuman eyes glaring back back into him; a small shack, more a lean-to than a proper building, in a crowded asian city, probably mainland china; the k-science lab, empty and echoing; the very depths of the ocean, unlit, darker than black, utterly other and yet somehow not really, not terrifying nor as suffocating as it should be; newton, running down a dank alley with kaiju cultists hard on his heels; newton, glaring up at him in hong kong, in sydney, gesturing so animatedly that kaiju slime flies across the room and hermann cannot hide his disdain; newton, pacing, seemingly either trapped or hiding in some dark, dank bunker, the walls plastered with kaiju diagrams.  leaning over a hunk of kaiju - liver, his mind supplies - scalpel in hand.  leaning over a fully preserved heart, watching in horror as it begins, slowly but surely, to beat._

After the last one, Hermann cancels his classes for the week and locks himself in Cambridge's most high-tech astrophysics lab, keeps the world locked out for three days and nights.  When he emerges, he does not stop even to change his clothes, but takes himself as quickly as he is able to his office, where he finds the mobile phone he has owned for a year and a half now, but never used.  He thanks himself for being so organized when he finds the charger cord curled neatly in the same drawer, and notes with pride that his hands only shake a little as he plugs it in.

There are messages, he notices, but does not stop to check them now.  Now, he goes to the only contact entered, put into the phone by the person who gave it to him, and prays to a God he's stopped truly believing in that the number will still work.

Mako Mori answers after the second ring.

Fifteen hours later, she and Raleigh Becket are standing in his sitting room, listening to news that he never wanted to have to tell anyone.


End file.
